All Faiths’ Blog
Child Abuse Awareness Month
April is child abuse awareness month and All Faiths stands for the cause and for the children affected by this horrible epidemic.
For close to 65 years, we have been the place to go and the place to help for those who are affected by abuse, neglect and other trauma – those who need support, services and professional help to overcome the effects of adverse childhood experiences.
We serve a growing need, an ever-expanding program – as our state is negatively affected by poverty, substance abuse, mental health issues and a segmented safety net that is unable to cope with the demands.
It is easy to understand yet it’s often overlooked how social issues are tied together. The child who shows up on the doorstep of All Faiths frequently has a parent who needs support with housing or food stamps – and may need mental health services themselves.
We pride ourselves in looking at the family as a whole – addressing their needs as complex as they may be, individualizing approach as much as possible. Our services are expanding. Each year we see more and more children, more families in crisis, and offer more lifelines to those who are struggling to make it with few tools to lift themselves.
This month, I invite you to think about the many layers of problems our communities face. It is reassuring to know that non-profit agencies, for-profit businesses and government entities all do their part to address the immense need — yet we cannot overlook the assistance that comes from us as individuals: the private citizens of our communities whose power is unmatched when it translates to sharing.
This month, I invite you to give toward the cause of child abuse – to give to All Faiths where we work with 4000 children throughout the year to better our community’s future.
We know it will take all we have – and all the help you can offer – to lift our children.
#BeEngagedNotOutraged
Thank you,
Krisztina Ford
Chief Executive Officer
Happy New Year!
Happy new year from all of us at All Faiths! We’re starting 2019 with interesting and exciting developments in both our larger political environment and closer to home.
With the new Governor have come many changes to the state government, a new focus and a vision that will place the issue of child welfare betterment on the front line.
It’s great news that, through a legislation called Families First Act, the country is trying to catch up to what All Faiths started many years ago. Recognizing that we were stuck in a reactionary mode to the issues of child abuse and neglect in our communities – and that the structure of insurance and programs only allow us to react to bad things that happened, rather than help prevent them – in 2014 we applied for and received a small grant that enabled us to work with families, rather than just the individual child.
It’s not rocket science to recognize that we cannot heal a child from trauma and then send them back to the same dysfunctional environment. If we want to affect real change, we have to ensure that families are strengthened and that they are connected to resources.
This is how our Family Wellness program was born – a group of thoughtful and invested people carved out a way to make an extended difference for the kids served at our agency.
The Families First Act is going to institutionalize this by challenging states to come up with their own systems in order to help and keep families together. This will be a fundamental shift in our approach to the child welfare and trauma-care programs and one that is surely going to be transformational for our communities.
And there is not another place that needs it more than New Mexico. Ranked 50th in child welfare, and just last week, deemed to be “the worst place to raise a child”, we know how much ground there is to cover.
We at All Faiths are looking forward to expanding our program to include more children and families than the 3800 we served just last year – it’s a new chapter for all of us and I hope to see all of you joining this shift in our services, standing up for the future of New Mexico and strengthening the non-profits that do the ground work for the benefit of all.
Sincerely, Krisztina